Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 8 – History and Historiography of Science

Update and Preview

This is basically a quick post to serve as evidence that I am still alive and well. I’m now living in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. The last month has been incredibly busy as I’ve transitioned back to life in the United States, and into a new job, all toting along a one-year-old. I have had some opportunity to work on my interests in the history of science, but not ones that will result in a blog post. However, one of the big things I’ve been doing is inspired by the continued traffic I’m seeing on my “Agricultural Colleges in Britain” post. Basically that post presented a chronological list of Britain’s colleges. But it turns out to be possible—thanks largely to the British zeal for local history—to pinpoint their locations (and the locations of agricultural research facilities), even for those that are now long gone.

So, what I’ve been doing is working on my skills with Javascript and (partially inspired by Alex Wellerstein’s marvelous work on Nukemap) the Google Maps API, to create a temporally dynamic map of Britain’s landscape of agricultural research and education. The above image is a non-dynamic still, which aggregates all locations I have mapped even though they might not have co-existed in time. I have the time variable working, but I don’t have all the foundation/closure/name-change information programmed in. And, as you can see from the image, I have put little effort into making it look pretty. I can’t say when this will go up, given my schedule, but I think it’s an interesting exercise. It nicely demonstrates that any historical appreciation of agricultural science and education in Britain cannot take into account the experiences of a single location or handful of locations, but must contend with the full research and education landscape, with which agricultural experts during any part of the twentieth century would have been well familiar.

(Going To) Rockville

[youtube=http://youtu.be/4zgh0y9vTgY]

Summer isn’t really the time for blogging anyway, but things have been particularly quiet around here because I’ve been busy moving away from London and back to the US. This has involved finding something to do on the upcoming conclusion of my Junior Research Fellowship at Imperial College (I am not making the move to King’s with CHoSTM), finding a place to live, buying a car, and all the other elements of a major transition.

Anyway, I can now say that I’ve agreed to join History Associates, Inc. (based in Rockville, Maryland, outside Washington, DC) as a senior historian. This will involve writing a lot of rapid-fire institutional histories, and—very attractively, to me—working with a research and writing team. Of course, commercial history is a very different beast from academic history, meaning, for our purposes, that I will not be blogging at all about (or from) my work. I plan to continue Ether Wave Propaganda as opportunity permits, but, since, between family and work, time for posting will be limited, I aim to make my posts as directly useful as possible. This means worrying more about history, and less about blue-sky historiographical critique and philosophy. Naturally, this doesn’t affect Chris Donohue’s posts in any way. Regular blogging should resume before too long.

Terminology: Art, Literary, and Music History; History of Philosophy; and History of Scientific Knowledge

When we start dividing up sub-categories within the history of thought or the history of ideas, we make distinctions of convenience: between explicit and tacit ideas, for instance, or between different genres of thought. These distinctions do not get at some internal essence of a form of thought. What they really do for us is provide us with provisional guidelines as to what forms of analysis are likely to lead to insights into things like: the genesis of an expression (“where did this weird idea come from?”), the circumstances bearing upon the form of expressions (“why did the author choose to publish that pamphlet at that time?”), and its relations with other expressions (“what did that film have to do with that book that appeared a couple of years earlier?”).

In my last post in this series, I marked out “intellectual history” as a sub-genre that can derive insight from the analysis of particular details of particular works, and that is centrally occupied with how works and their creators respond to prior and contemporaneous works. In this post I will look at some areas that fit in and around the sub-genre of intellectual history: art/literary/music history, the history of philosophy, and the history of scientific knowledge. As always, no historian need confine themselves to a particular genre, and the comments are open for clarification, dissent, and debate.

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Alder on Art History and the History of “Episcience”

My next post in my “Terminology” series will discuss art history and the history of science (among other areas) vis-à-vis the category of intellectual history. As these two areas are also discussed by Ken Alder in his recent Isis Focus essay, “The History of Science as Oxymoron: From Scientific Exceptionalism to Episcience,” (free) I thought it might be useful to discuss that essay first.

Alder’s piece is part of a Focus section on “The Future of the History of Science,” and, as such, contains arguments about where the history of science is and where it ought to go. (This sounds obvious, but Alder actually isn’t very explicit about these points, so we need to dig a bit to figure out his opinions.) Initially, he seems to believe that, intellectually, the history of science is exactly where it needs to be, and that what it needs to do is get out into the world. The problem is the world just doesn’t get what we do: people at parties don’t understand what the “history of science” is, and the Wikipedia History of Science page is a mess. Thus we need to “rebrand” (90).

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Schaffer Summarized

Discussion of this early-’80s vintage video follows below the fold.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/ccfGq4Mqbjo]

Between 2008 and 2010, I wrote a large series of posts looking at Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre, from his earliest publications in the late 1970s to articles published in the early-to-mid ’90s, with the idea of being as comprehensive as practically possible. I picked Schaffer’s work for the experiment basically because he’s a famous historian, and I’d met him a couple of times, and, like most people who meet him, I found him very engaging.

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Pitirim Sorokin on Fitness and “War Waste”

Питири́м Алекса́ндрович Соро́кин (1889-1968) was considered in many ways to be the anti-Talcott Parsons due to their notorious disagreements over the merits of Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action (1937) as well as his rather tyrannical personality. Both Sorokin and Parsons were philosophers of history (due to Parson’s late embrace, like Karl Popper, of evolutionary models of societal growth and development) and the separation of their intellectual projects is not as pronounced as is thought. Sorokin was an evolutionist who was also an “old-school” sociologist insofar as he considered the social scientific heritage of the latter nineteenth century to be quite valuable. His 1928 Contemporary Sociological Theories is a compendium of the mental furniture of social theory in the long nineteenth century. Robert Merton, who was always careful to distance himself from Sorokin, betrays Sorokin’s influence in his citation methods and in his adherence to the “spirit” of the argument of his sources, rather than the letter. Both Merton and Sorokin were lumpers (see Merton’s 1936 paper, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action”), but they lumped heuristically.

Sorokin’s Man and Society in Calamity: The Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence Upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life (1946) immediately reminds one of R. A. Fisher’s work, or that of Alexander Carr-Saunders. All three looked at rates of differential fertility and the impact of social forces (wars, revolution, migration) on the evolution of human civilization. All considered human evolution to be determined by differing forces than those governing natural selection. As importantly, Sorokin continued the “war and waste” debate, also referred to as the “military selection” debate, a controversy which marinated through much of the later nineteenth century, but which really had two great stimuli: the Boer War and the First World War. David Starr Jordan as well as Thorstein Veblen were two important interlocutors in this debate.

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Terminology: Intellectual History

This post continues my discussion of historiographical terminology. All definitions are ones I personally adhere to, but the idea is to open questions about useful distinctions and the terms used to describe them.

My previous post was on the “history of ideas,” which I take to be a very general category, applying to the ideas of populations of all sizes, and encompassing both explicitly held ideas, as well as those ideas that reside implicitly in texts and other works (e.g., worldviews, ideologies, customs, values, etc…). In this post, I’ll discuss a subgenre of the history of ideas, intellectual history.

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Terminology: The History of Ideas

Arthur Lovejoy (1873-1962), proponent of one version of the history of ideas

One of the drums I like to beat is that historians’ methodological toolkit is well developed, but that we do not use this toolkit as cooperatively and as productively as we might. Part of making good use of tools is having good terminology, which helps us to understand and talk about what tools we have and what they’re good for, and how they can be used selectively and in chorus with each other. It also helps avoid needless disputes, where vague language leads to perceptions of wrong-headedness and naiveté. For example, I like to talk about the need for “synthesis,” which I take to mean an interrelating of historians’ works at the level of their particulars (rather than mere thematic similarity). For me, synthesis is a sign of a healthy historiography, but such calls could be dismissed by others as a call for “Grand Synthesis,” which all right-thinking historians have been taught to shun.

For this reason, I thought it might be useful to suggest some definitions, which I personally follow. In some cases, these are the result of extensive reflection, and, if you go into the archives of this blog, you will find I do not use the terms consistently. And, of course, I don’t suppose my terms are the final word on the subject. The best thing would be if they opened the door for debate and clarification. In this post, I want to talk about:

The History of Ideas

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Otis T. Mason on Technology and the Progress of Civilization

Otis Mason (April 10, 1838 – November 5, 1908) was at the turn of the century one of the premier theorists of primitive evolution. He was a curator at the Smithsonian Institution for much of his career. Anthropologists remember him chiefly for his use of the “culture area concept” and for his contribution to “diffusionist studies.” A “culture area” is a “region of relative environmental and cultural uniformity, characterized by societies with significant similarities in mode of adaptation and social structure.”

Diffusionism, as argued by the American anthropologist Clark Wissler, contended that cultural traits (gift-giving, technology, language, etc) moved from a given center, which implied that the “center of the trait distribution is also its earliest occurrence.” Wissler contended that cultural areas and geographic traits were “broadly congruent, implying a mild environmental determinism” (Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. Alan J. Barnard, Jonathan Spencer, 61-62.)*

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In Praise of Praise: How Historians Could Improve Celebratory History

This afternoon, thanks to the initiative of Jim Grozier, I am giving a talk at the weekly High Energy Physics seminar at UCL. The subject will be my work on experimentation in early particle physics. While my “Strategies of Detection” paper mainly concerns the problem of how to build “mesoscopic” histories of experimental practices, my talk will repurpose my argument to discuss how we can articulate and evaluate experimental ingenuity and skill. This jibes with other thoughts I’ve had about whether it could ever be considered legitimate for a professional historian to write a celebratory narrative of scientific progress. The very notion triggers the raising of well-disciplined eyebrows: isn’t it the job of professional historians to problematize celebratory narratives? But, really, I can’t think of a good reason why not, and it seems to me there is substantial opportunity to improve the genre.

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